“He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.”

“The only certain happiness in life is to live for others.”

“On July 2, McCandless finished reading Tolstoy's "Family Happiness", having marked several passages that moved him:"He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others...I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books , music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps - what more can the heart of a man desire?" ...”

“Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live”

“And I, too, am the same… only there is no love in my heart, or desire for love, no interest in work, not contentment in myself. And how remote and impossible my old religious enthusiasms seem now… and my former abounding life! What once seemed so plain and right – that happiness lay in living for others – is unintelligible now. Why live for others, when life has not attractions even for oneself?”

“[...] he felt that he too was only a baby, with the chance to live without shame, without the need for consolation for a life lived wrong, a chance to be again innocent, simply and impossibly happy.”